Senate Standing Committee on Agriculture

The Senate Committee on Agriculture will come to order. Good morning, everyone. Happy Ag Day. It's so lovely to see you here this morning and in attendance. As you know, today we are going to be having an informational hearing on navigating threats to California agriculture. This is kind of an ongoing conversation about the challenges that we face here in the state. And I want to begin by welcoming Senator Dave Cortese to the Senate Ag Committee.

It's a pleasure to have you, and we look forward to working with you. And I wanted to also provide you an opportunity, if you wish, to provide some comments.

Well, thank you, Chair Hurtado. I'm very pleased to be here, and I intend to play as active a role as I can with the Committee going forward. As you know, and I'm not sure others know, I have a longtime ag background. I come from an orchard farming family in Santa Clara Valley, and the family is still involved in agricultural pursuits to this time. So my own lived experience makes this an exciting experience for me here in the State Capitol. Thank you.

Thank you, Senator Cortese. Okay, we'll get started with our Senate Committee hearing, and we'll begin with the first person here to present, Aubrey Bettencourt, President of the California Almond Alliance. Come on up, and welcome.

Thank you so much. And thank you for taking the opportunity to continue to shine a light on our proud and unapologetic California ag industry. Madam Chair and Members, there's a lot of things that we're going to talk to you about today, but I'm going to start, I'd be remiss if I didn't talk about two of the primary functions for us in the almond industry and in the almond community here in California.

We're going to focus on two things, and if we don't fix these two things, there's almost no point. And that's going to be functionality of our market and water. And these are universal truths. I just got back from two weeks in Spain studying various ag systems there. This is around the world for our farmers, and our farming population in the world is becoming smaller and smaller, and the population we have to feed is becoming bigger and bigger.

We're seeing almonds in headlines a lot these days, but not for necessarily the same reasons we always do. It's been mostly about things going out of business, and it's been about acreage being reduced. And it's true. Orchard removals have increased in 2023 again, to about 83,000 acres as of August 31 of 2023.

That's up from 60,000 acres removed in 2022. After three years of record carry-in, the almond industry is still recovering from the pandemic. And the inability to ship has suppressed prices for three years in a row. According to recent reports--on top of all of this--from the USDA and the American Farm Bureau, production of agriculture in general is the most expensive it's been in years. 28%, it's up. 28%, the cost of production in agriculture across all sectors. The dynamic here, though, is this.

This is key. That the drop in wholesale prices of almonds as a result of the inability to recover, and the increased cost of production, is not being passed on to the retail consumer. And with very few exceptions, it's seen at the marketplace. Retailers have maintained their pricing despite the lowest wholesale prices in almonds in several years. While you may pay $10 to $12.35 for a pound of almonds at the store, today, the farmer is receiving $1.40 to $1.90.

So it's like John F. Kennedy said so many years ago, for the farmer is the only man in our economy who has to buy everything at retail, sell everything at wholesale, and pay the freight both ways. And while investment operators can utilize Chapter 11 to restructure and live to farm another day, who's really at risk are our smaller family operations, that under-100-acre farm.

And for us in California, where we have 7600 almond farms, 90% of them are family-owned and operated and 75% of them are under 100 acres. That's who I worry about. But pivoting over to water. While we still have an undersized and out of date water supply system, and some of the policies that manage that are equally out of date, we're seeing some progress.

Great strides have been made into fast passing construction of key critical infrastructure and a really interesting approach to a supply and abundance focus on behalf of the Department of Water Resources. The great concern, though, for our farms is how do you farm in a post SGMA world? The Sustainable Groundwater Management Act has been identified as having perhaps a 2 million acre impact on the Central San Joaquin Valley. The question for us, and the one that we've decided to embrace at almonds, is exactly that.

How are we going to lean into the solution? What do we need to farm in a post-SGMA world? And while Public Policy Institute estimates 2 million acres of productive irrigated ag land has to be abandoned in order to achieve sustainability, I would argue that recent studies and recent activity proves otherwise. For that conclusion is based on a false premise that fallowed acres equals water. And that's just not the case.

You can fallow 10 acres in one location and 10 acres 50 miles away, and I can save you water in one place and not in the other. Not all acres are the same, and we have the technology today to identify where and how to be most effective to achieve true sustainability, not only for farm productivity, but also for the safety and security of our aquifers.

A recent program at the Department of Water Resources, in partnership with the Almond Alliance and Western United Dairies, is called the LandFlex Program, and it has proven this concept. LandFlex, the 2023 pilot, demonstrated the program's versatility with measurable results as a practical tool for real-time flood control and the protection of communities and properties, while still developing a long-term groundwater recharge capability and capturing groundwater overdraft for immediate SGMA compliance, while still keeping the farmland in the farmer's hands.

The results were 17,747 acre-feet of water recharged, protecting communities and watersheds during major flooding events in 2023, providing long term groundwater sustainability supply for future drought. It immediately protected at-risk water systems through 56,587 acre-feet of total aquifer savings, and permanently retired 84,370 acre-feet of aquifer overdraft for SGMA rapid drawdown. This is instant SGMA compliance. That is the equivalent of 16,512 homes' domestic wells immediately protected across seven critically overdrafted basins.

To date, ladies and gentlemen, this is the only groundwater program that has produced real, measurable wet water. The primary takeaway from the 2023 LandFlex pilot was that immediate and multiple returns on the state's singular investment by partnering with landowners, by partnering with the farmer as part of the solution. The incentive mechanism of the program provides immediate action on two things. I'm going to be repetitive, but it's important to remember. Expansion of groundwater recharge capacity and permanent SGMA compliance, and immediate and permanent SGMA compliance.

The accomplishment of both of these objectives is for flood protection and drought resilience. The two key components of the program: it's easy to turn on and turn off. From flood to drought, it provides solution. And the expansion of the program can be based on real-time hydraulic needs, again targeting critical acres that have been identified. In conclusion, almonds, like all ag around the world, are facing incredible challenges in embracing these solutions.

We like to say that we lead in solutions in almonds, and the reason we say that is because we have way too much at stake and way too much good to do. California almonds are the fourth largest agricultural export of the United States, responsible for nearly 100% of the United States market and 80% of the world's almond supply. 80% of the world's wing nuts we should be proud of that we can produce here in California.

Almonds have reduced water use by 33% since the 1990s, and another 15% since 2018. Almonds are a zero-waste crop that provide 4 individual commodities when growing. Almonds growing in California sequester 30 million metric tons of carbon a year. That's the equivalent of over 3000 Boeing 737s coming out of the air and 24 million cars coming off the road every year. We're leaders in biodiversity. 86% of the nation's certified bee-friendly farms are California almond farms.

Farming almonds is good for the environment. But moreover than that, almonds are perhaps the most plant, the most nutrient nut in the market, producing high protein, fiber, calcium, vitamin E, riboflavin, essential for a heart-healthy diet, gluten-free diet, muscle recovery, and managing combating diabetes. Yep, farming almonds is facing a lot of critical challenges and will no doubt change the way that we farm going forward. However, two things I would specifically ask for.

One is we would specifically recommend LandFlex be expanded across all critical basins and our moderately overdrafted basins so they can get a jump start on SGMA compliance and maintaining working ag land, for all of the benefits that we've talked about. And more broadly, what we need from our leadership, like you, is to be a partner in these solutions, to engage our farmers and our industry as the global experts that they are. And together we will generate great, sustainable and profitable and healthy path forward for California agriculture.

Thank you.

Do we have any questions from committee at the moment? Okay, thank you. Up next, we have Jamie, and I'm sorry if I mispronounced your last name. Fanous. Come on up from the community alliance with family farmers.

All right. Right. Can you hear me okay?

It's good to see you, Senator. So, yeah. Good morning. My name is Jamie Fanous. I am the policy Director at the community alliance with Family farmers. Calf currently represents over 8000 small and mid scale family farmers in California and has worked for over 46 years to preserve family scale agriculture and promote environmental sustainability. I want to give some context about small farms in California. Nearly 80% of farms operate on less than 180 acres.

By federal standards, these are considered small farms and nearly 70% of farms operate on less than 100,000 in annual gross sales. Per most recent census data, we're losing over 1500 small farms a year. And the challenges facing small farms are overwhelming and make the simple act of growing food to feed local communities a nearly impossible task.

The realities of the climate crisis, rapid consolidation and existing supply chains disproportionately affect people who are making a living producing food, which includes the one in five farmers who identify as black, indigenous and people of color.

We are at a dangerous tipping point if we have any intention of protecting our small family farms, local communities and food security. Today, I'll be covering two significant challenges facing small family farmers.

One, land access and two, access to government resources as we experience one significant climate disaster after the next, such as droughts, floods and wildfire. While smart farms continue to get squeezed out of markets, we are concerned about the budget priorities of the administration.

In the last several years, we have worked closely with the Legislature to get funding to programs that truly support those that need state resources the most and where those funds would go the furthest.

These include A, programs that prioritize small and underserved farmers with emergency relief or specifically the California Department of Food and Agriculture. California Underserved and Small Producer program, or CUSP programs that work on building out critical supply chain infrastructure for small producers, such as food hubs, specifically the CDFA farm to community food hub program.

And lastly, new programs that are directed to producers that have never been included in existing programs, such as urban farmers and farmer training programs focused on BIPOC producers, namely the CDFA Urban Agriculture program and the CDFA beginning farmer and farm worker training program.

Most recently, the Urban AG program was oversubscribed by 600%, yet it will not receive any new funding and in any additional years. And yet, these are programs that have been repeatedly proposed to be cut by the administration in this year's budget proposal.

The following are proposed to be cut 12.9 million to the CUSP program, which is funding for drought relief for hundreds of farmers that have yet to see any dollar, and 14.4 million to the CDFA Food Hubs program, a program that was created in 2021 and has never been successfully stood up in three years. We know 100% of the CUSP funding goes to small family farmers and farmers of color.

Meanwhile, the administration did not ask for any cuts to the GOBiz drought and flood program, which only provides 20% to 25% of its funding to small family farmers and farmers of color. We disagree with this decision. Luckily last year, and we hope this year, the Legislature has stood up for small farms and protected these modest investments.

Meanwhile, we thank the Administration for not proposing cuts to flood relief for small farms, which is $5 million in the cusp program. But it's a bit troubling that these funds are not yet provided to relief for family farmers more than a year after the program took place or the funding was offered.

Overall, these programs are hands down some of the most successful and accessible for small and BIPOC farmers, and yet they are consistently on the chopping block, even in times of budget deficit. We should protect these modest investments for programs that can make or break a farm business across California for farmers that have zero safety net.

On land, while our natural resources and land, including land and water, are increasingly changing hands from farms to corporations and hedge funds, I want to name a few important statistics. 5% of all landowners own over half of California's cropland, while only 25% of land is owned by the other 85% of small landowners, and nearly 40% of Farmland is rented or leased by non farmers.

In summary, the majority of agricultural land today is owned by the few, and certainly not farmers. Given this data, it makes complete sense why the majority of small BIPOC farmers we work with struggle to find land. It's entirely out of reach. And for farmers who manage to find land to lease, unfortunately, they're unable to invest in that land. They manage, and often are at risk of being kicked off due to discrimination.

Unless you've gained access to land from a family or have several million dollars readily available, secure access to land is 100% impossible. The only entities that can purchase land in California are large corporations, hedge funds, investment firms, and, as we've seen in most recent news, tech billionaires, none of whom are local farmers. We've gone over these examples in this committee of where these challenges are happening in real time. But I want to offer a quick refresher.

In Cuyama Valley, in east Santa Barbara County, as we speak, two global companies, Grimmway, which is owned by Hedge Fund and Bolthouse, have decided to sue every single water rights holder in that valley.

These companies are suing hundreds of community members, farmers who produce our food, and the local school district that educates and feeds the community's children, all of whom are at risk of losing their water rights or completely going bankrupt in the process.

And now many of the Solano County agriculture community are facing a $510 million lawsuit, which the Flannery group has accused these farmers of colluding. So we need solutions.

And, of course, in Solano County, prominent Silicon Valley investors, including Lauren Powell Jobs, have used vicious land grab tactics that they have taken tens of thousands of acres of valuable food producing land out of production and are putting at risk the number one employer in Solano County, agriculture.

We need immediate and serious laws and regulations to stop these land grabs from continuing if we have any hope of taking back our control of our communities. Senator, your legislation this year, SB 1153, is a great step forward to tackling these major issues.

Also, bodies like the California Land Equity Task Force at the Strategic Growth Council is a great step forward as well. And I want to name the $145 million investment for land access that's currently in AB 408 by Assemblymember Lori Wilson.

Bond proposal and many other bond proposals currently moving through the legislature. And furthermore, there are incredible solutions by the state supporting BIPOC farmers with land access. Thanks to the majority leader, Aguira-Curry, a group of black farmers in Yolo County received state funding to purchase land.

Today they have 20 acres and have formed a collective called the Ujamaa Farmer Collective. We need these kinds of success stories and these kinds of investments in our community. Farmers. Thank you.

Questions?

Thank you. Thank you, Madam Chair, I know you focus a lot of your time on access to land. The state conservation program, the grant program, what is your position on how much that should be augmented and how effective it is?

Yeah, absolutely. I think those programs are really focused on conservation, which is important. I think what needs to happen is potentially expansion when it comes to access. Ultimately, a lot of those existing programs are more accessible to land trusts and existing entities. Really focused on easement.

We're focused in those programs. They're focused on keeping land out of development and keep it in agriculture. The problem is that that is supporting those that currently have land. The challenge is that we have so many beginning farmers, farmers of color, and small scale farmers that have never had access to land.

So they're either leasing or they're going through an incubator program right now. And once they're done with that training program, the likelihood of finding land is extremely slim.

So finding ways in which we can actually expand those existing programs or develop sister programs where it's actually creating some stepping stones to actually getting access to land would be my recommendation.

Yeah. My experience in Santa Clara County, although funding has been limited, is that the program has been used to turn land back over to farmers.

And with 40% of the population there being an immigrant population, it almost seems to replicate what was happening 100 years ago when my grandfather came in, where essentially the high price of land is subsidized by the state and the county, who come in and realize that they're going to have to essentially turn that land back over to someone to continue farming it without any kind of return on investment to the county or the state in terms of lease value or an outright sale.

So we found it to be a very effective subsidy in an area where there's still 15,000 ag workers. A lot of people don't realize that, because Santa Clara County is essentially the first Silicon Valley, but there's 12,000 acres of flatland farmland there.

And I know that the program has been effectively used to some degree in Sonoma, but it just seems to me that the funding of that program, or something very similar to it, is absolutely necessary with a high cost of land, at least in Northern California.

Absolutely. Yeah. Would agree with that.

Thank you.

Any questions?

Not at the moment, but thank you so much. And up next, we have Roger Isom, President of the Agricultural Energy Consumers Association. Come on up. Welcome. Good to see you.

Well, good morning, Madam Chair. Senator, first of all, let me start by thanking you for the opportunity to come and speak today. I'm President and CEO of the California Cotton Generators and Growers Association and the Western Agricultural Processors Association. But today I'm here to talk about a critical issue affecting AG, and that's energy.

And I want to piggyback on something that Ms. Bettencourt brought up, and that was talking about the price of almonds and the cost that what the growers are actually seeing, I just emphasize that a lot of commodities are seeing those same challenges.

I'm going to use walnuts today for the best quality Chandler Walnut you could possibly get is 45 cents a pound. But if I walk into Rayleigh's, it's going to cost $8.99. The growers are not seeing that there's a huge disconnect.

And many people will say, well, prices are depressed because you guys have just planted too many acres. And I would argue that that's not the case, that we're subject to world price and that most of the nations and areas that we compete with don't face any of the challenges from a regulatory perspective that we face here in California. And that's really where I want to go today is talk about energy and specifically electricity.

The AG Energy Consumers Association, we represent several thousand growers, irrigation districts and ag associations representing processors and growers. So we deal specifically with electricity issues at the PUC and the Energy Commission.

But what's happening today is this state's very aggressive push to address climate change. And while I understand that the aggressiveness is going to put agriculture right in the crosshairs, and in particular, we're talking about two very important rules that the state, one has already adopted.

One will be adopted this summer, and one is what I call the electric truck rule, or the advanced clean fleets rule, and the electric forklift rule, or what they call the zero emission forklift rule that will be adopted later this summer.

And basically what it's saying is we're going to electrify the entire industry. And this isn't just agriculture, obviously, it's everybody but for agriculture. And bringing it back that we can't pass along these costs is going to be impactful.

But where it starts is the very beginning. And one is that we want to electrify everything, but we don't have the infrastructure today to even start this. We have an almond processor that was built in the industrial park of Madera County, if you can believe this. The industrial park that is not hooked up to electricity from PG&E, they have no capacity in that area.

They are run on natural gas generators and solar panels, whereas a citrus packing house that's being built in Sanger, which you're very familiar with, but out there, they have now hit capacity. I have an email from PG&E that says several of the substations out there are maxed out. We can expand no more. So what are they going to do? They're going to put natural gas generators in.

So here we are trying to address climate change, yet we're going backwards because we're having to install natural gas generators, albeit very clean, but they are not zero emission, to be able to provide power and provide jobs here in the state. So you have that before you even start. And then you have to understand the scale of what we're talking about here.

When we talk about charging a truck, a DC fast charge, truck charging, which is I'm talking about heavy duty trucks here, still takes three to 4 hours even with a fast charge, is a megawatt apiece. Okay. There are 1.7 million trucks operating in California on any given day. A megawatt apiece for a charging station. So think about if you, if you don't think about our Ag facilities, think about the truck stop as you drive down I5 or 99, right? There's at least 50-60 trucks in there. If they're all on charging, that's 50 or 60 MW.

Now what does that mean for every 20 megawatts demand you have to build a substation? We haven't built a substation in PG&E territory. We built one in the last 10 years, 1.7 million trucks a megawatt apiece. We are nowhere near this. To put it, to give you additional scale, dial blue canyon 2250 MW. That's all it produces, which is a lot when you think about it. But then you think about how many trucks need to be charged.

And again, I'm only telling you the heavy duty trucks. I'm not talking about medium or light duty trucks or the thousands and thousands of forklifts that will have to be added on as the state goes to electric forklift rule. So that's one element, that's the supply side. Now is the cost. So if we think about cost.

For a conventional, if I went out to buy a brand new diesel truck today, the cleanest burning diesel, it's going to cost me a little over $200,000. For an electric truck, you're talking about $450,000. We had one of our cotton module mover trucks. A specially designed truck to haul cotton is $475,000 today. If I go buy a hydrogen truck, you're talking about $525,000 minimum.

How are we going to be able to pass along that cost, whether that's the right thing to do, the appropriate thing to do, it's a challenge for us that has no ability to pass along that cost. In addition, on the electric side, for a heavy duty truck, it's 9000 pounds of weight, for the battery. That's 9000 pounds of weight that I'm going to lose.

So if I equate that again to that cotton module mover, for every 9000 pounds on there, I haul four round modules at 5000 apiece. So I hold 20,000 pounds of weight. Putting that electric means I can only haul two modules. So what that means is I'm going to double the number of trips. So it's going to double my labor for me to be able to haul in the season. If you equate it to almonds, it's 40,000 pounds, roughly 40 to 50,000 pounds that we're hauling.

So I'm going to have to do an extra trip every four trips if we convert over to electric. So that's another additional cost. But then let's talk about where is this all leading? What are the rates today? And I know, I believe this handout has been given to you guys. Is that correct on the rates? So the first slide that I wanted to show you guys is, where are we today? Commercial rates, we have the highest in the country already.

Those rates do not include what's coming to build all this infrastructure that I just talked about that we need, nor does it cover the cost of all the undergrounding that we're going to need to do over the next 20 years. That cost is not included in there. That cost will be borne by ratepayers. So that's an additional challenge that we have.

The last slide I put in there, again, just to give you some comparison, was a cost comparison that USDA does every three years of all the cotton gins across the country. And if you look at the west, which is California, we are more than double the national average for electric rates. The cost to our gins, that's before all these increases that are coming.

So when you talk about the impact to Ag, these two rules, and this state's push to go all electric, well, again, I understand it. It's going to present a huge challenge for us from a cost perspective to stay in business and address those concerns. So there needs to be more thought process put into that going forward. Thank you.

Thank you, Roger. At this moment, I would like to just announce that Senator Ben Allen has joined us. Thank you for joining us. And I'll open it up for any questions you may have for Mr. Isom. Anybody from the committee? Senator Cortese, go ahead.

Thank you, Madam Chair. I mean, just a simple question to try to get me up to speed, because I'm more familiar with Ag crops as a commodity, especially fruit, going back some years.

When you add the cost of EV or hydrogen in terms of your equipment, forklifts, long haul trucks, heavy equipment, onto the commodity price of what you're selling, who are you competing with today? Are you competing internationally 100% of the time? Are you competing with other states?

And what are you seeing as the differential there? What I'm hearing is California. We need to get there. California is being very aggressive, though I'm paraphrasing what you said. Very aggressive compared to who?

Because that should be to me, the one question, if we're really talking about commodity prices, if everybody's not coming along, then somebody's going to undercut your prices and you go under. Right?

Right.

Can you explain that to me just in terms of the overall market?

Sure. So obviously it's going to be different for every single commodities. Some are just maybe domestically and competing with other states and others are going to be international. For example, in tree nuts we export 70% on average. When you add all the tree nuts together on cotton, we export 100% of our cotton. But even I'll just use cotton as an example.

While I'm competing on an international market, I am competing against other states that are producing the same commodity but do so at a fraction of the price. So it's not an easy answer to give you, but it's both when I look at it from this standpoint.

Again, converting to electric isn't our first foray into air quality issues. We've had to replace our trucks once already. We've had to replace several our tractors. No other states are doing that right now and don't have that in the forecast.

So we're having to do that. And the only way that we've been able to do that is through incentive programs like farmer and others doing on our own. We couldn't do it because there's no way to. Again, I can't charge more for a pound of cotton or a pound of almonds. They're just not going to matter. They can find that somewhere else.

What is the worst evil for you in terms of commodity prices right now? The cost of water or the anticipated costs of these energy conversions?

That is a great question. I don't know if I'd say the cost of water, but certainly the availability of water is probably at the top of the list. Energy labor would be up there, pesticides or the availability of pesticides would be up there as well. But probably the availability of water.

It seems to me the cost of water, because of the lack of availability of it, the rising cost of wholesale water would have a significant impact on your ability to compete in the marketplace. But again, I'm not clear who we're competing with. Obviously, almonds would be whoever has water cheaper than us in other parts of the country.

But I don't know where anyone's even getting anywhere near us. Given the statistics of how much of the world's supply is being produced right here in California.

There would seem to be some ability to increase prices on the market to help cover some of these costs. But I don't know if that's the case across the board right now. I don't know where other than south of the border, where know nectarines are coming from, pomegranates are coming from, apricots are coming from, cotton is coming from, and what those farmers outside of California are experiencing in terms of water costs.

Yeah, I don't know. Maybe it's not addressed the almond question better than I can, but again, it's going to depend on the commodity I'll use cotton, for example. Brazil certainly would be one that doesn't have these challenges, has the water. You could say the same thing with Australia, some other ones, but those are the ones that come to mind.

So almonds specifically. Yes, we hold the domination because, quite honestly, we're blessed by geography and by hydrology or climate. That being said, where I'm worried, to be honest, is the rest of the world knows how much almonds have potential for market growth and knows the demand for almonds in the world. And they see the problems and the challenges we face here, and they're anticipating. No offense, how to sell us out.

Okay, here's what's going to happen. Almonds, all of our crops, they're going to chase cheaper water, cheaper labor, cheaper energy, and someone will genetically figure out how to grow these in places that we don't. Right now, it's already happening.

There's investments in this across the world from research in Spain, Australia and other places. So what's happening is right now we dominate, but the world knows the problems that we face are not the problems from elsewhere. So to your point, what happens if you're growing something south of the border?

And by the way, I had a farmer in Chihuahua call me and say, we want to grow almonds. They don't have the same regulatory pressures. They don't have the same cost of input. They don't have the same values we do, quite frankly, and they will produce cheaper and the market will continue to chase that.

It would be interesting at some point, I think, through the chair, to get information in terms of what those numbers are, regionally, interstate, and then internationally. I'm really just focusing back on the presentation about energy costs and water per se.

I mean, we know they're going up. We know the state policies are driving some of those up by design. If we're going to hydrogen and electric power more instead of traditional fossil fuels, diesel and so forth, but I think it would help us at some point.

I'm sure you didn't come in here today prepared to break things down for us, but to the extent industry representatives can provide those numbers, they're more than nuances.

Again, I'm not going to spend my whole year in the committee talking about my own experience, but I can guarantee you that Santa Clara Valley would not be devoid of orchards today and producing nothing but semiconductors if we had not at one point been competing on the market against the Central Valley, which at that time had water available to it in abundance at $12 an acre foot, and we were paying upwards of $100 an acre foot.

You can't tack that onto the price of fruit and ship it to LA and compete. You're going to ship it to LA and the market is going to pay what it wants to pay, and you're going to end up pulling your trees out. And that's the real story of Silicon Valley.

But that's why I asked the question. The irony of it is that, not to digress, but the semiconductor industry uses far more water than we ever used in agriculture, and at times that's been subsidized.

But chips don't have the same cap on commodity pricing. They never have different product, different relationship to the market. So I'm just explaining why I'm asking these questions, because I do understand that history will repeat itself if we aren't careful.

Whether that's better state protections against competition or whether it's better state protections against folks monopolizing water, I don't know. But I think a starting point is for us to understand just how impactful those numbers are and where that competition is coming from. You can't blame the others for competing if they got cheap water, but I'd like to know where it's coming from.

Absolutely. Sundarin, that last slide that I had there, that compares electricity to different regions across the country. That is something that USDA does every three years. They've been doing it since the early 2000 s to try to get at some of what you're talking about. What I didn't include in there is they also do it for labor. They also do it for fuel, for propane or natural gas, which we use to dry.

And in every situation, the west is the highest or California is the highest. But it is a great question and something we certainly are faced with every day.

Thank you. Thank you, Madam Chair.

Questions at the moment. Okay, well, I appreciate your testimony here today. For me personally, I always talk about, we talk about climate change, we don't talk about agriculture.

And I think kind of to your point, there's just a really deep connection between, or as they refer to it, the energy, water and food nexus. You can't talk about agriculture without talking about water, without talking about energy and how they're very much linked with one another and rely on each other.

They can't live alone. They go together. So I appreciate you providing us with your input here this morning. Thank you. And up next, we have Michael Delbar, CEO, California Rangeland Trust, here to talk about a little bit, give us some insight into the Williamson Act. Welcome.

Morning, Madam Chair, Senators. What a beautiful day to celebrate the bounty of the Golden State, particularly out on the west steps. I hope you all have a chance to get out there today. I'm Michael Delbar, the CEO of the California Rangeland Trust, and the Rangeland Trust's mission is to serve the land, people, and wildlife by conserving California's working rangelands.

We work with ranching families that want to voluntarily conserve their working range lands in perpetuity through the use primarily of agricultural conservation easements.

Since 1998, we've helped over 90 ranching families permanently protect nearly 400,000 acres of pristine rangeland from the threat of development and conversion. Our smallest easements, a 32-acre portion of a rangeland in Bay Area, and our largest is the 80,000-acre Hearst ranch in San Luis Obispo County.

But here in California, the nation's largest ag state, we are seeing some of the most productive farm and ranch land being lost to development at an alarming rate without consideration of our food security and environmental needs.

Along with providing food and fiber to our state and nation, working landscapes also provide an array of ecosystem services by cleaning our air, sequestering carbon, recharging our groundwater supply, supporting biodiversity, and mitigating catastrophic natural disasters.

Sorry, like wildfires. According to a study by the American Farmland Trust 465900 acres of Agland in California were developed or compromised between the years of 2001 and 2016. That's approximately 31,000 acres of Ag land loss every single year.

Today, I want to talk a little bit about some of the programs in our state that are helping to address this issue of agricultural land loss and the challenges and opportunities with those programs. So first, the Williamson act. The purpose of the Williamson act, also known as the California Land Conservation act of 1965, is to encourage the preservation of ag and open spaces by reducing property taxes for qualified landowners.

It provides critical property tax relief for the owners of around 16 million acres of rangeland and farmland that's enrolled in the state under the act. Landowners who enroll in the program agree to keep their lands in agriculture or open space for a period of 10 years, and in exchange they receive lower property taxes based on the agricultural income value of the land rather than its potential development value. Big difference.

This reduction in property taxes provide a financial incentive for landowners to preserve their lands rather than sell them out for development. According to the status report from the Department of Conservation released in 2022 54 of the state's 58 counties participate in the Williamson act program.

Prior to 2006, the Department of Conservation would review and verify acreage per county under contracts, and the state controller would then pay participating cities and counties and establish subvention per acre enrolled in the program to offset the city and county's foregone property tax revenues.

Due to state budget cuts, the cementation payments were fully eliminated in the 2010-11 fiscal year budget under Governor Schwarzenegger, the total convention funding in the final year of the appropriation was approximately 38 million.

Today, it's estimated that the appropriation would be somewhere around $40 to $45 million. Following the elimination of the subvention payments, Imperial County also filed nonrenewal of all the Williamson act contracts effective in January 2011 that covered about 117,246 acres.

Following the elimination of the subvention, many other counties have slowed the pace or put a moratorium on the acceptance of new applications, but overall, the lands under contract have remained fairly stable. The Williamson act is the most cost effective mechanism for land preservation in the state.

In addition to being structurally cost effective, the program is also fairly easy to administer. The continuance of the act is a cornerstone to a strong ag industry in this U.S's number one ag state and has myriad benefits that are important to helping the state meet its policy goals to enhance climate resiliency and biodiversity.

Production agriculture isn't the most lucrative business, but it's a necessary business and we need to be offering producers solutions to help them stay in business to ensure a safe and secure food system. In addition to land conservation through Williamson act, permanent conservation easements also are an important means to address agricultural land loss.

I mentioned the Rangeland Trust has conserved nearly 400,000 acres across 90 plus ranches to date. However, we have another 95 ranching families representing over 225,000 acres across the State of working rangelands that are vetted and in our pipeline. They are all waiting on funding to make those conservation dreams a reality.

While production agriculture is worthy and fulfilling endeavor, it is not typically a lucrative business thanks to market fluctuations, weather extremes, natural disasters, overregulation, water, and input prices. Ms. Bettencourt made this statement earlier, and I think it's worth repeating.

Ranchers and farmers are probably the only ones that pay retail and sell wholesale. In many cases, conservation easements are a tool that can help a landowner and their family stay in business. California's economy relies on production agriculture.

Yet a study by the American Farmland Trust found that our state only invests 11 cents per capita in permanently protecting agricultural land, compared to Delaware, which earned the top score among the states of an average spending per capita of $6.03.

California is fortunate in its policies, however, and it ranks up in the upper part of the land protection policies. We have some wonderful funding programs in California, including the Sustainable Aglands Conservation program, which I believe, Senator, you mentioned alluded to earlier, which is funded through the California's cap and trade system and administered by Department of Conservation. Since 2015, Salk reports funding 168 easement acquisition projects throughout the state, encompassing 194,000 acres.

It's a great program, and they do their best to get the dollars out on the ground, but even this year, they're tapped in terms of human resources, and we won't be seeing any grant opportunities this year through the Salk program. Another big funding program is the Wildlife Conservation Board.

Wildlife Conservation Board, back in its budget surplus of 2022, was given $250 million for land conservation. We were all pretty excited about that, but a big chunk of those dollars went into fee acquisition on behalf of the government.

So those lands now have to be managed, whereas conservation easements come with the land manager and those lands stay on the tax roll. Much of that funding, we understand, is not no longer available. So that is a tough one for the landowners that were excited about coming off that waiting list and actually seeing their conservation easements materialize.

We also have funds coming into California through the farm bill the NRCs typically gets in California for their Agricultural Conservation Easement program and Agricultural Land eEasement program, otherwise known as ASEP Ale, somewhere between $7-8 million a year, which is not a lot of money for the state.

I do want to address a comment, Senator, regard to conservation easements and the access to ranchers and farmers while the landowner that has that land acquired, or we acquire the easement on that, that lowers the value of that land. So when that land is sold, it is not sold at its market value. It's sold closer to the development value is gone. It's been realized by the landowner.

So it does provide an opportunity for younger farmers and ranchers to acquire those lands and get started, because as we all know, land acquisition is a huge impediment to getting more folks into this business. Just to sum up, the Williamson act provides the best ag land conservation in California for a nominal investment by the state.

And due to the strong support and commitment by counties, I think that needs to be reiterated, that counties that have stuck through this despite that loss of tax revenue, they see the importance of the policy that Williamson act provides due that strong support. Those benefits are still out there for 16 million acres that are enrolled.

While the Williamson act provides protection on a rolling 10 year basis, conservation easements are an important tool to stave off development, permanently protecting working ranches and help keep farmers and ranchers in business.

However, demand for easements heavily outweighs the supply of state and federal dollars allocated to conservation easements. It's a great problem to have on one hand because we have landowners that are willing to permanently protect these working lands in the state, but we have to help them realize that before it's too late.

In order to ensure we continue to have these valuable and vital lands in our food security, for our food security, wildlife, water and air quality, open space, and to meet the state's goals for climate resilience, we need to permanently protect these lands while we have the chance, before we lose those opportunities and we lose the lands themselves. Thank you.

We'll go ahead and open it up to comments or questions from Committee Members. Senator Cortese.

Chair, I just wanted to say thank you. I appreciate the presentation. I have to step out for just a minute and I'll be back, but I don't have any questions. But certainly we'll follow up with you with regard to any brainstorming in terms of how to chase down funding to increase the program. It's been phenomenal to the point that we've been able to address the waiting lists.

It's been disappointing to the extent to see 3rd, 4th generation farmers who no longer have family members who are willing to farm but are willing to sell those easements, which is a big jump, a big step for somebody even emotionally, sentimentally, to be able to say, hey, look, we'll take the easement dollars, go ahead and let somebody else, a retiree, a young person, an immigrant, new to the know, farm this land. It's proven to have tremendous potential.

And I think Senator Laird was actually involved during his time as a secretary in helping to stand up the program. And I think we need to personally think we need to go back.

No, it's tough times right now, but we need to go back and have some kind of a strategy for building the program up, ramping it up so that the people on the waiting list start to come off and we start to develop hope and patience, because people know if they know the money is coming, they'll be patient, and that land won't go to so quickly to development interest or whoever else they might sell something to, like their water rights or other areas in their bundle of rights that go away and then impede the very ability to do something with that land.

There's a tremendous example in, of all places, Long Island, New York, which I would have a few years back, never thought had any experience like this, but they actually conserved virtually all of their agricultural land there through an easement program that was just fully funded. It was fully funded, and it's created a beautiful marketplace there where people come in from Manhattan, make the long drive all the way into Long island just to get the farm to table products that are being produced.

And those farmers that would have been out of business a long time ago have either passed that along to somebody else, who's doing the farming or have somehow benefited from the program themselves. So like I said, I'm a believer in the program, but I'd like to be part of the solution going forward.

Senator, we welcome that and appreciate that support. Our waiting list, or our pipeline was almost as high as a half a million acres not too long ago. We've accomplished some of those projects. Some of those projects are obviously still on the list, but we lost the opportunity for others when landowners ask, what do I need to do to be part of this program?

And I said, you have to have patience and lots of it, because it takes years to get through, and especially when funding is not available, and we are looking under every rock to find it and match it with other funders, it takes a long time.

So the luxury of time is not what a lot of landowners have before they have to settle a death tax bill or that one family member that doesn't want to be part of the ranch, doesn't want to do the work, but wants their share of the value. And so those factors really play in. So helping to find a solution to that for a long term is we have some ideas. We'll be in touch with you. Thank you, sir.

Okay, folks, to know I'm here at the invitation of the chair, a lot of really interesting issues. I'm going to go over these materials. I'm not a Member of this Committee, but as a result, I've been scheduled over several times this morning. But I'm excited about Ag day and all the work you're doing. I really do want to get my head around some of these challenges you're all facing so we can be helpful. So that's my presence here.

Well, we really appreciate your presence here. Thank you for joining us. I do want to kind of touch a little bit or just try to have a better understanding of the will and sim act. If you could run me through, and I know we also have here with us a representative from the California State Association of Counties, Catherine Freeman, as well. But I wanted to get a little bit more of a rundown in terms of the cancellation. What does that mean?

If a cancellation of a contract, is that a good thing? Is that a bad thing? Does it impact anybody or anything? If you could run me through that a little bit more, that'd be very helpful to me.

Sure. Senator, two ways to cancel. The county can start. The non renewal would phase out over a 10 year period, assuming it wasn't the superior Williamson act, which is a 20 year contract, or the landowner can cancel and pay a hefty fine or penalty fee to do that, I guess, I'm sure. What's the right word to use there? But when we cancel a contract, obviously we lose that ag protection.

And that's the one weakness in the act, that it's a rolling 10 year period or 20 year, and so that can end soon, or it can end over a 10 year period. So it's not a permanent protection. But when we lose that contract, the landowner is starting to pay now the full Prop 13 assessed value at some point, and we lose that potentially we lose the ag value. Depending on what the landowner's purpose is.

Usually, if it's going to be canceled a contract, they have something other than ag in mind.

Are the cancellations, does that usually happen before they sell land, or what does that look like if someone decides to cancel it? Experience.

That would require me to be in the mind of each of those, and so it's hard for me to answer that one. Ms. Freeman may be better able to address that.

Come on up.

Good morning. I'm Catherine Freeman with the California State Association of Counties. So the contracts can be canceled on either side of the ledger for the farmer. I mean, it's a very difficult decision, but it may be pressured by housing development. And as you know, counties have regional housing needs assessment where we need to be developing housing. The question is where and how. And the Williamson act has always been this incredible tool to allow for there to be open space.

Every piece of farmland on the edge of a community is used multiple times. It's not just the farmer, but the open space, as you've heard today. And so when the contract is canceled, normally there's this 10 year period where we sort of phase it out. But as Mr. Dalbar has said, this can happen very quickly. And the fees paid in mean that it's likely that there's going to be a change in land use.

Now, counties control land use, but there is pressure to be able to develop housing for all the Members of the community and to anticipate growth in the future. One thing I would mention about the Williamson act is the subventions that stopped in 2009 paid for core services for counties.

So as we see challenges in our health and human services, that actually was partially paid for by the subsidies that the state paid into counties for these Williamson act subventions, and we're not getting them back anytime soon, we will always advocate as counties for the subventions to return, but for the last over 10 years, it has not happened. So it sort of adds to the challenges that we're facing at the local level.

But we continue to support the Williamson act as a really critical tool for preserving our agricultural land for all county functions.

Thank you. Thank you for that. So the full Prop 13 value that goes into effect once the cancellation occurs, is that correct?

When it's completed, yes. If it's rolled out over that 10 year period, 10th year, then that kicks in.

Okay, well, I see no other questions from Committee Members. That's all I have on my end. And I appreciate you both the opportunity to speak a little bit more on this, but also to answer the questions, and we'll go ahead and invite our next speaker up. Thank you. We have Daniel Hartwig, President of the California Fresh Fruit Association.

Well, good morning, Madam Chair, and thank you for the opportunity to come and speak this morning. I'm Daniel Hartwig. I'm the President, as you said, of the California Fresh Food Association. Before that, I worked for a large farming operation, and currently my brother and I also are partners in our own farming operation as well, growing almonds and forage, both of which have actually been discussed here this morning. Wanted to talk this morning to you guys about the invasive fruit fly issue.

One of the topic of today is challenges here. A lot of the things have been discussed today so far have been kind of broader based challenges. This is a very specific challenge here for a lot of the commodities. California Fresh Fruit Association used to be known as the California Grape and Tree Fruit League. Previous and before that was a grower and shippers protective league and table grape growers and Chippers Association. A lot easier to say California fresh fruit Association than what we were known as before.

And we're a voluntary, nonprofit trade Association. So a little bit of background on our Association. We have membership going from Lake County in the north all the way down to Coachella Valley in the south. We represent 13 fresh fruit commodities, table grapes, stone fruit, palm fruit and blueberries, figs, kiwis, pomegranates and persimmons. Our membership categories include shippers and marketers, growers, as well as various associate Members.

And California represents about 99% of table grape production in the United States, 99% of nectarine production, 95% of plums, and 70% of peaches. So touching on the invasive species and invasive pest issues that we've been seeing most recently, previous to 2023, I should say we saw glassy wing sharpshooter and Pierce's disease. I was with my family farming grapes at that time. I remember the issues transporting grapes and making sure that none of those pests were being transported throughout the state.

We used to also see European grapevine moth as well, the spotted lantern fly and the black fig fly. So those are just some of the ones we previously saw. The ones what we're seeing this year is it kind of blows all those out of the water. This year is far beyond anything we've seen previous. In October alone, we were up to 600 detections. That had grown to 700 by November. In January, we're at 1000.

It's kind of stabilized at that point right now, but previous to that, the average was 75 detections, and it's never been higher than 500 before. So we're more than twice any record levels we'd seen previously. And there's four main levels of main pests of concern. We have the Mediterranean fly. A lot of folks know it as the med fly. That was obviously a huge issue in the oriental fruit fly, the Tau fruit fly, and the Queensland fruit fly as well.

So a lot of the issues have been found kind of down in the south part of the state. The medfly has been found mostly in Los Angeles County. The Tau fly is also La County, but closer to Santa Clarita. The Queensland fruit fly has been in Ventura County, but the biggest one so far has been the oriental fruit fly, and that's mostly around the Riverside and San Bernardino areas. That alone kind of is the epicenter of what we're seeing.

There's 800 of the fines have been in that area, and that's kind of centered around the Redlands area, if you're familiar with that location. A lot of fruit had been taken out of those locations. About 440,000 pounds of fruit from 1700 different properties, and a lot of that's just residential areas. What we haven't really seen is a huge commercial set of issues yet.

But that's really what we're getting to be really concerned about is if something like this was to come into the central valley or where we see a lot of fruit being grown. Detections still are occurring in Southern California. There also have been fines in Northern California as well, albeit a lot smaller fines in Sacramento County, Contra Costa County, and Santa Clara County as well. And those are all also the oriental fruit fly as well.

There haven't been any new fines, though, in Northern California since October 1 of the main issues here for California crops. So there's a lot of different hosts that are impacted here. 300 specialty crops. The bounty of California is that we grow a lot of different things here, which provides a lot of different hosts. Unfortunately, 300 different crops that are grown here in California. The commodities that we represent that are impacted, apples, apricots, figs, grapes, nectarines, pears, persimmons, plums, pomegranates.

Other commodities include avocados, bell peppers, melons, tomatoes, walnuts. You can make a really great salad out of all the things that are impacted by this. Citrus is the crop of the main concern right now, mostly because it's a winter crop and a lot of it's what's grown there in the southern part of the state as well. I think I went ahead a little bit here and then based on the commercial value alone of just those commodities, that's $16.4 billion in impact.

If those commodities were all to be essentially quarantined or unable to be sold or traded or anything like that. And additionally, there's threats to the state's fruit fly free status for trade and export, which is a huge part. And I'm going to touch on that a little bit later as well, on the trade impacts as well. But we'll move on now and talk a little bit about our quarantine requirements.

If you're actually on a site where the fruit flies have been found it's a detection site that fruit can't be moved off property. It has to either be processed or juiced basically on site. It's pretty difficult to juice a lot of commodities, especially oranges are one thing, but it's not like there's a lot of mobile juicers floating around or anything like that. So it's obviously a huge problem if you're a grower and you have one of these fines on your property.

If you're within one of the core areas, there's treatments available that you can do. There's post harvest treatments, and then you can transport it for processing, juicing or freezing, but only with the approval of the county ag Commissioner. And if you're outside of that half mile radius, that core area, then you can do pre harvest treatments using malathion, which is an insecticide. But it takes four applications of that for 30 days, and all that has to be monitored by CDFA.

And then with that treatment, it can be transported outside the quarantine area for domestic and interstate transport. But you can't transport it internationally, so you lose that entire, that marketing opportunity as well. There's also compliance agreements. There's just a ton of paperwork that comes with this. And it becomes really difficult to be able to sell your product if you have one of these fines anywhere near you. I want to touch a little bit as well on the trade impacts.

About 25% of our fresh fruit grown here in California gets exported. And we again have fruit fly free status, which if you say it three times fast, I can definitely applaud you if you're able to do something like that. But if you have that fly free status, see, I couldn't do it, then you have that preferred status. There's fewer treatment requirements.

Basically, if you are using something called a systems approach for exporting, you don't have to go through do all these treatments, you don't have to fumigate. There's a lot of different things you can avoid by having the fruit fly free status. And because we have that, it gives us a lot more opportunities to export to a variety of export and trading partners as well. You can use methyl bromide if you want to. Methylbromide is being phased out, of course.

It's not a tool that a lot of folks like to use. And as we're trying to open new markets as well with a lot of our commodities, it makes trade negotiations a lot more difficult because they put more restrictions on what they want us to do to be able to export into their countries. And that definitely impacts our competitiveness, the price and everything there touching on the next steps here, the funding. We were grateful to get funding, $103,000,000 from USDA that came back in December.

That really is supporting a lot of the efforts that are going on right now to do these controls. The state also, I think Governor Newsom, I should say, I think Governor Newsom has proposed $22 million in the January budget proposal, again, to help control that. We definitely like to make sure that money stays in there because again, we have a lot at stake. Basically, our industry is at stake if we don't get these things under control.

CDFA has done a great job and has done a great job communicating and talking to stakeholders. We need to continue that communication as well. But really the next step we need to do, though, is figure out what caused this. Right? Why is this all of a sudden? Why are we seeing more than twice what we've ever seen before right now?

There's not a whole lot of explanations, a lot of theories going around, but we need to make sure that we are controlling that, and then we need to make sure that we're finding the answers here so we can control in the future and we don't have these types of outbreaks in the future.

One other thing I do want to kind of pivot to and touch on is just the amount of the tools that we need to control these as the state is moving towards an SPM model, software tools and things like that, it takes away a lot of our tools to be able to control these things. Can you imagine if you brought your car to me or your car had a problem or something like that?

And I said, well, I know how to fix your problem, but all I have is a crescent wrench and a screwdriver. Go ahead and get your car fixed or whatever. That's not going to work very well, right? We have the tools. We know how to actually fix these things. We know how to control them. But as we take away these tools, we just don't have access to be able to fix the problem in the way we've used to.

So DPR really needs to fix their licensing, the setbacks, and the amount of time it takes to actually get things permitted, because right now we are losing more and more tools and we're not putting anything else back in our toolbox. That's really all I wanted to touch on today. If there's any questions, I'd be happy to answer those at this time.

I just was wondering if there's anything that you may want to touch on on how pest or lack of being able to use the tools that you need, what are the ramifications thereof? Does this have a health impact? Obviously, there's a production impact, right? So if you could just touch a little bit on that, it'd be great.

Well, you say health, right? So, I mean, fresh fruits and vegetables are some of the healthiest things that we can eat and the healthiest things we can put in our body.

If we had one of these outbreaks in the Central Valley, for instance, and we can't get under control, or we don't have the tools to control it there, and we had to quarantine all the fruits here, I mean, the entire United States wouldn't be able to get access to, as I said, 99% of the nectarines or 95% of the plums. Everything we grow in California, particularly in the valleys here, that feeds so much of the United States and feeds the world.

And if we can't get control of this, then that's a huge problem.

I don't have any questions from other Committee Members, but I will go ahead and move to. Thank you, Daniel, so much for your presentation. And what I'll do is I'll go ahead and move to public comment. So if anybody wants to come up and have anything additional they want to add to this hearing, please come on up and do so. Now's the time.

Great. Thank you. Good morning, chair and Member. My name is Brian Shobe. I'm the policy Director with the California Climate and Agriculture Network, or Calcan. And my family has been farming for as far back as we can trace in our family history, at least a few centuries and across the centuries and the continents, the crops they've grown, the languages they've spoken, the technologies they've used have changed. But one thing has remained the same and allowed them to thrive, and that is a stable climate.

Today, agriculture's number one business partner, which is and has always been the weather, is less reliable and, frankly, increasingly hostile. And that's making all of the challenges and threats you heard about today increasingly common and increasingly severe, from the drought to flood whiplash to increasing invasive pests and longer breeding cycles of those pests, to wildfires, et cetera, and even higher energy costs and grid disruptions. Until we figure out how to stop climate change, those threats will become worse.

And so while you have the impossible task of tending to all of these immediate challenges, I also ask you to keep your eye on that longer term challenge, both for this generation of farmers and my generation of farmers, who have hopefully another good. 40 seasons ahead of us.

So on behalf of Calcan and also the Food and Farm Resilience Coalition, which is a group of 18 ag, environmental, farm worker, and food security organizations, we are asking the Senate to include investments in food and farm resilience in the Senate's climate bond proposal. I know you all here agree with that and are here to help us. And so for that reason, I want to thank you, chair, especially for inviting Senator Allen today. He needs to hear that as well.

So thank you for hosting this hearing, and I'll see you out at ag day.

Thank you. Do we have any additional Members of the Committee would like to speak? No, everyone's super shy today. Okay, we'll go ahead and. Okay, we have one more. All right.

Madam Chair, Louis Brown, on behalf of a variety of agricultural interests in the State of California, and I just want to first start by thanking you for your commitment to the industry, the efforts that you and your staff are making to raise the profile about the issues that are impacting agriculture. I can't say that it's unfortunate that we are having ag day out on the Capitol today, and there's going to probably be anywhere from 80 to 100 Members of the Legislature there celebrating agriculture.

Yet the issues that you heard today are real, and there's more of them that are impacting people's ability to grow food, fiber, flowers in the greatest place in the world to actually make that happen. And so what I would ask that we do as a continuing effort from this is not stop this conversation today. These are not necessarily emerging issues. These issues have been occurring for a while, and they're getting worse every day, impacting people's ability to stay on the land.

So if we're going to be true to our commitment of celebrating California agriculture and ag day, these conversations need to continue. We need to be serious about looking at the issues that are impacting California agriculture, our ability to compete with our neighbors as well as our international partners. And if we're not going to be serious about that in a few years, the landscape that we're looking at, your district, the Central Valley, are going to look a whole lot more like the Silicon Valley, unfortunately.

And so, again, I thank you for your commitment to this and hope we can continue the conversation.

Anybody else? Going once. Going twice. Okay, we'll move on to closing remarks. Senator Cortese, go ahead. And if you'd like to say a few words before ending the Committee hearing, please feel free to do so.

Just thank you very much, chair rotato. I've enjoyed my first Committee meeting and looking forward to rolling up our sleeves as we've done on a couple of other issues and working together to address some of these issues. And I thought it was great testimony today, a great format for the testimony, allowing folks to come up. I'm sorry I missed one of the speakers. My office will circle back and make sure to get that presentation and go back and review it.

But thank you for putting together a great hearing.

Thank you for being here, for being part of this Committee. We're so excited to have you. And also, I know he's not here at the moment, but we want to thank Senator Ben Allen for joining us. This, you know, I continue to have conversations with anybody and everybody who allows me to talk to about the importance of agriculture, not just on ag day, but every day.

I really talk and try to highlight the importance of it, not just for food, but for also how agriculture is connected to health, how it's connected to not the food that we wear, but the clothes that we wear. It's important that we talk about the challenges, but also that we talk about the opportunities. And I know there's plenty of opportunities to improve. There's plenty of opportunities out there. We just got to make sure that we come together and find a solution.

So I want to thank you all for participating, for the panel, for being here, for answering questions, and of course, we're always here to listen to any additional ideas or thoughts you have on all things agriculture. I hope that you enjoy today celebration of Ag Day out here at the believe is the west steps. So with that, the meeting for the Senate Committee on Agriculture has now concluded.